My NDPR review of Hare's Limits of Kindness

... is here. I'm a big fan of Hare's work, and of NDPR, so it was great to be given the opportunity to review the former for the latter!

How to Have an "Equal Chance"

You're in a lifeboat, and can save just one of two people depending on whether you row east or west.  Suppose the person to the east is a bit closer: Go east and the person you save will be restored to comfort a little sooner. That strikes me as a good enough reason to go east.  Some claim that this would be "unfair", and that you should instead flip a coin or use some similarly robustly chancy method.  In The Limits of Kindness, Caspar Hare puts pressure on this idea by presenting the following spectrum of more-or-less "chancy" methods:

Dominance Arguments and Singer's Pond

In chapter 12 of The Limits of Kindness, Caspar Hare offers an interesting "dominance"-based argument that you cannot consistently (i) prefer to save the drowning child in Singer's pond, and yet (ii) prefer not to save a distant child via donating to an effective charity.

Hare's set-up is as follows:

When you are considering whether to aid a needy child, you care about two things, your well-being and the well-being of the child.  When both you and the child are better off in one state of affairs than another, then you prefer the one to the other.  But when you must trade off your well-being against the child's how you make the trade-off depends on your relation to the child.  When the child is physically near, psychologically salient to you, such that only you are in a position to save him, and in a rare relation to you (for short: near etc.), you place greater weight on the child's interests--"I can't have nearby children dying for want of help," you say. When the child is physically far, not salient to you, such that others are in a position to save him [but won't], and in a common relation to you (for short: far etc.), you place greater weight on your own interests--"I can't solve all the world's problems myself," you say.

Hare then contrasts a Near case where little Ned has a comparatively less happy life at stake, with a Far case where little Ned would suffer a comparatively worse death if not saved.  By dominance reasoning (it being better for Ned and worse for no-one), Hare claims you must both (i) prefer the state of affairs of saving Ned in the Far case over saving Ned in the Near case; and (ii) prefer the state of affairs of leaving Ned to die in the Near case than leaving him to die in the Far case.  So, given that you prefer saving Ned in the Near case over leaving Ned to die in the Near case, you must similarly prefer to save him in the Far case rather than letting him die in the Far case -- else your preferences across these four states of affairs will prove cyclical.

Rationality and the Rooted Amnesiac

Suppose Amy has a deaf son Dale, whom she loves, and because she is so attached to Dale (and his actual personality) she reasonably prefers the actual outcome over an alternative world where she had a non-deaf son Hamish who grew up to be overall better-off than, but also very different from, how Dale actually is.  Call such partiality, rooted in one's attachment to an actual person, a rooted preference.

Some background:  I previously appealed to such rooted preferences as an objection to Caspar Hare's morphing argument, suggesting that a decent person might reasonably prefer a world where a counterpart of Dale exists over a world where a slightly better-off counterpart of that counterpart, but who no longer qualifies as a counterpart of Dale, exists instead.  Hare now responds by running his argument in terms of "active favoring", which is basically a special kind of counterfactual preference where we ask what the agent would prefer if she were agnostic about which world is actual.

Option-Dependent Preferences

One more post on Caspar Hare's morphing argument. In this post, I'll argue that partialists who reject Hare's view will naturally be led to the curious view that our preferences over possible worlds should depend upon which worlds are candidates to be actualized.

Anti-Haecceitism and Personal Concerns

My previous post outlined Caspar Hare's morphing argument, and one objection. My objection, roughly put, was that at some point in the morphing sequence we find that the morphed individual has changed so much that they're no longer the "same person" (in the morally relevant sense of personal identity) that we originally cared about -- 'Jack', say. In that case, we may reasonably prefer the preceding world where Jack exists, over the subsequent world where a slightly better-off person exists in place of Jack. I think this undermines even the counterpart-theoretic version of Hare's argument, but he at least considers a related worry when he turns to address the identity theorist. In this post, I'll describe his response and why I find it unconvincing.

Personal Concern and Chains of Counterparts

In chapter 9 of his forthcoming book The Limits of Kindness (cited with permission), Caspar Hare offers an ingenious argument for the view that transitivity + minimal decency (i.e. preferring pareto-superior alternatives, whereby some people are better off and nobody is worse off) actually commits us to anonymous benevolence, i.e. preferring world A over world B whenever the inhabitants can be put into a 1:1 correspondence such that the person in A is sometimes better off, and never worse off, than their paired member of B. So, for example, it commits us to preferring (contra Taurek) that we save the many rather than the few in rescue cases, and that we bring into existence better-off rather than worse-off people in non-identity cases. Very roughly, it's an argument that moves us from personal to impartial concerns.